The Inconvenience Posed by Sufis

Posted on April 19, 2004 in Morals & Ethics Occupation of Iraq Reading

You will not be a mystic until you are like the earth — both the righteous and the sinner tread upon it — and until you are like the clouds — they shade all things — and until you are like the rain — it waters all things, whether it loves them or not.
  – Bayazid Bistami

I’m browsing Fadiman and Frager’s Essential Sufism, which, like my own writing, tends to compress its wisdom. (I never could understand the desire to write more than one needs to convey precisely what one needs to say.) It’s partly an act of rebellion and partly a resurrection of a spirit which has become anathema, heretical in these Christo-partisan United States, namely the notion that one can embrace many faiths, find wisdom in many sources including the ideas of our adversaries.

When 9-11 came down, I remember having a long discussion with a woman from South Dakota at the now defunct CNN chat server. This Catholic — whose church had merilly launched three or more crusades into the Holy Land — insisted that Sufism was part of a long established Islamic plot to create fellow travelers. There was no room for diversity among Muslims in her picture, no possibility that these followers of Muhammed could have disagreements within their own. They worked together towards world domination by Islam.

I’ve reflected a great deal about that since then and I’ve come to believe that what we see in Islam reflects what we see in ourselves. The Russian who came to fix my microwave a couple of weeks ago told me that the problem with Islam was that it was the only religion that had a word for “Holy War”. I reminded him that Christians spoke fondly of Crusades.

Atheists, Jews, and Christians unite in the belief that Islam reeks of evil, that this religion turns every last adherent into a terrorist and a despot over the affairs of his own family. We have worked hard to create a picture of the scimitar-waving fanatic and have forgotten Saladin, the just and generous commander of Muslim forces who drove the truly fanatical and mercenary Crusaders out of the Middle East.

The price we pay for our willful ignorance is jingoism, militarism, and purblindness. We separate ourselves from the peoples of the Middle East so that it becomes easier to kill them. We invent rigid, Koran-encrusted minds that hate our book and our way of living with one another. If Muslims will continue to harass us as long as we remain Christian and American, then, our logic goes, the only solutions available to us are conversion and eradication. It is essential to see Muslims as prisoners of their religion because if they are not, the justification for Iraq becomes attenuated, fragile, untenable. Our faith in the war threatens to topple if we find ourselves killing people who love God as we do. Therefore we must make them godless.

The standing stones of our hearts encircle a monolith upon which is carved a bowdlerized history of what happened before and what happens now. There is no room to talk about our own atrocities because this is a holy war in the name of freedom. You are either for us or against us, the logic of the heartland goes. We shall make it rain on them, we shall throw our terrible electronic lightning at them, we shall wreck their cities, we shall make a world where the clouds, the rain, and the earth do our bidding for we, the New Chosen of God, have achieved a terrible perfection, a unity of apathy regarding what our leaders do in our name at best, an outright blood-dimmed perversion of Christian ethics and values at the worst.

I think it’s high time to demythologize the conflict in Iraq and the Middle East, to see it as yet another Crusade which will claim many lives until we are either driven out or have laid unjust waste to land that is not ours.

We cannot abide the idea of Sufis here in the West because they don’t fit the awful story we tell ourselves about the power of the Koran to wreak evil. If there are people of peace among Muslims, then our bombs must be precise and limited, our soldiers compelled to asking questions first. We can’t make war on Islam: we must face that people die when we bomb and when we shoot, that we’ve invested billions of dollars towards a fundamentally unChristian end. The Sufi’s existence interferes with our own holy war whose aim may be Armagaeddon.

The aim of denial in the name of our sancified cause isn’t to make us better Christians, but to force us into a lockstep mirroring that compelled by the worst elements of our opponents, to deny all alternatives including agnostic reason and Christ’s pacifism, to hold us thrall to an idol wrapped in simulated black leather.

Freedom lies in an open mind, in constant pilgrimage to all the shrines of thought, selecting what breeds compassion from them and living by it.